Friday, November 4, 2011

Gifts of Christmases Past

Last year when I stumbled on a recipe that my husbands family had loved, but thought they had lost when their grandma died, I got to thinking about how easy it is to loose those little things we remember that made the holidays special.  This year I am resurrecting a few other old recipes of Grandma Tallman's that I found in her old cookbooks.  While we'll be giving the cookies to my in-laws as gifts, I think preserving some of these traditions, left over from "the old world", is also giving a gift to ourselves and our kids.  In an effort to recover some of the lost past on my side of the family, I have contacted a cousin in Ireland and explained that I don't have any old, handed down traditional Irish recipes, and would he ask his mum, and her siblings what they remember.  I explained that even if they could remember a name and a few ingredients, I could likely find something close on the Internet.  I'm chasing down the past and trying to make new traditions for my own family.  I want my kids to have more of a sense of their heritage than just knowing where their ancestors came from. 
     One of the better gifts I have ever given, was homemade, and will probably never get used.  In digging up old recipes, my mother-in-law gave me the names of some dishes that she remembered from her childhood.  With those and a few others, I put together a "cookbook" of traditional Norwegian recipes.  In between the recipes, I put old pictures of her family that I had found on Ancestry.com.  Pictures of her grandparents when they were still in Norway.  Pictures of her mother as a teen.  Pictures of the family in later years, more the way she remembers them.  My mother-in-law is in poor health.  She can't do much cooking and baking the way she used to.  She will probably never use even one of the recipes I printed out for that cookbook.  But, when my husband gave her the cookbook, she remembered almost all the recipes I had found.  Her hand traced over the pictures of her family.  She murmured the names of loved ones lost long ago.  And she was speechless. 
     Hindsight being 20/20, I should have made a copy of that cookbook for myself, as well.  Someday I will.  For now, I keep fining new recipes to try, I'm still chasing down the old recipes, and I'm trying to find a heritage for my children that has nearly been lost.